Popular US tech sites hit by outage

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A number of sites belonging to the Open Source Technology Group,
among them the technology news site Slashdot, were offline for
about 90 minutes shortly after 11pm AEDT on Thursday, according to
the network services firm Netcraft.

Among the other websites run by the OSTG are sourceforge.net, IT
Manager's Journal, freshmeat.net and Linux.com.

According to Netcraft, OSTG's sites get an average of nine
million page views daily.

Slashdot is popular among some types of tech readers and, in the
past, has been known to direct large volumes of traffic to stories
on other sites which it links to. This effect has lessened
recently, a report says.

Netcraft said rumours about a possible reverse flood of traffic
from links on another site, iprimidi.com, appeared to be
unfounded.

Jeff Bates, the vice-president of editorial operations for OSTG,
said the outage was due to the fact that a core router had a
network driver failure. "(We) had to go in, rebuild and restart,"
he said.